Havana la Habana
Havana la Habana

Author: Nancy Stout

Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offers a photographic tour of the city's houses, gardens, gas stations, cinemas, cemeteries, and barbershops while discussing historical and cultural aspects of Cuban architecture.

The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany
The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany

Author: Michael Hau

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2003-04-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0226319768

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, Michael Hau demonstrates why so many men and women were drawn to these life reform movements and examines their tremendous impact on German society and medicine. Hau argues that the obsession with personal health and fitness was often rooted in anxieties over professional and economic success, as well as fears that modern industrialized civilization was causing Germany and its people to degenerate. He also examines how different social groups gave different meanings to the same hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals. What results is a penetrating look at class formation in pre-Nazi Germany that will interest historians of Europe and medicine and scholars of culture and gender.

The Springboard in the Pond
The Springboard in the Pond

Author: Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen

Publisher: Mit Press

Published: 2000-02

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780262720328

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built form, until now no one has investigated the swimming, pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America's infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar hole - the domestic swimming pool - and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. At one level, the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story permanently altered. At another level, it is the story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. And at still another level, it is a material philosophy of water. Van Leeuwen explores the human relationship to water from a variety of viewpoints: social, religious, artistic, sexual, psychological, technical, and above all architectural.

Times Gone By
Times Gone By

Author: Vicente Pérez Rosales

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-05-01

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9780198027829

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

These memoirs trace the wild and adventurous life of Pérez Rosales from his childhood up to the 1860s. During that approximately half-century he saw and did more than a dozen ordinary men. At age eleven in Argentina he witnessed the executions of Luis and Juan Jose Carrera. From there, his activities and adventures took him on several journeys on sailing vessels around Cape Horn; to Paris, where he witnessed the July revolution of 1830; to various commercial endeavors including a distillery, the practice of medicine, and cattle smuggling; into service as an advisor to an Argentine warlord; as a miner for precious metals in the north of Chile; as participant in the California Gold Rush in 1849; as director of the government's project for German immigration and settlement in the wild south of Chile; and also as Chilean consul and immigration agent in Hamburg. Around the world, Rosales lived through many of his era's watershed moments. His exciting memoirs offer a chance to relive the rush and chaos of these times--from a much safer vantage.